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He who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High . . . will be concerned with prophecies . . . and penetrate the subtleties of parables; he will seek out the hidden meanings of proverbs and be at home with the obscurities of parables. -Sirach 39:1-3Early in his exploration of the writings left by the Church Fathers, St. John Henry Newman discovered that the primitive Church approached evangelization and Christian initiation in a completely different way than we do. Newman saw that …

How can the Catholic Church teach that it’s possible for us to lose our salvation when Jesus says that his sheep always hear his voice and that no one can snatch us out of his hand?Recall that the Catechism warns of “offending God’s love” and “incurring punishment” (2090). To fear incurring the punishment of hell implies that a person can’t have absolute assurance of his salvation. There is a Bible passage that some Protestants use to mount a challenge—John 10:27-29: My sheep hear my voice, and …

After he was raised from the dead, Jesus made time for a heart-to-heart talk with Peter, who had denied Jesus three times on the night Jesus was arrested. Some of the disciples were out fishing on the Sea of Galilee. By a miracle, the risen Jesus filled their nets with fish, and: When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, …

There are two main types of Bible difficulties: - Comprehension difficulties - Conflict difficultiesA comprehension difficulty occurs when a passage is difficult to understand, and Scripture certainly contains things that are hard to understand. The Bible even admits this:Count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understan …

One modern distortion stands out in our approach to revelation: our preference for the written word over (and even to the exclusion of) the spoken word. Another modern distortion is that we think of books as private rather than public. As Mary Mills explains in her commentary on Ecclesiastes, “in the modern world much reading is a private matter in which, through the possession of literacy skills, one individual engages with a text in a direct and personal manner.” The combined effect of those …